THE RIVER IN MANCHESTER looks tougher in the rain. It fortifies itself with the steel-gray of the sky. It preens itself in the storm like a small man flexing in a health-club mirror, as if it hadn't been tamed years ago by the textile mills that line its banks. In fact, the mills themselves look tougher in the rain, as if the New Hampshire Democrats traipsing about inside had come not to hear a candidate speak but once again to grind out the goods for a muscle-labor America, as if they'd gathered again to work at all the old lost jobs and not to wander about through hallways lined with bargain armchairs, pausing to browse at Becky's Place--gifts for you and your pets. It is here that Bill Bradley comes to christen his Manchester headquarters. He comes to the Riverwalk Mills, to this mausoleum of old Democratic dreams, surrounded on all sides by cut-rate furniture. It's a vital place now, because Bradley's campaign is just catching fire, its quixotic beginnings already a dim and fading

memory amid the muted autumn colors that follow a long summer's drought.

"[I'm] talking about my opponent," Bradley says to the crowd, his sparse and quirky eyebrows bouncing on every syllable like the little white ball in an old movie sing-along. "He represents established power. He arrives here in Air Force Two. I arrive in a van. I have to reach out to people one-on-one, allowing them to take the measure of which of us could be the next president of the United States."

They cheer and whistle--modest cheers, polite whistles, the surprising momentum of this finely crafted insurgency just beginning to build. There is a consistency to the crowd: dripping flannel and soggy khaki--Clean for Gene has gone Bald for Bill--and they love this talk about taking on established power, even coming from a small-town banker's son, a Princeton graduate, an Olympic gold medalist, a Rhodes scholar, a former NBA star, a respected former senator, a man whose public career would seem to make him as much of a renegade as Captain Kangaroo. Some of them--men in their forties, mostly--make a curious gesture. They stretch out their right arms and flip their wrists backward in a kind of inverted port de bras, as if they were tossing something blindly back over their shoulders. They slap one another five.

"Can you hit the shot?" one of them chortles. "I can still hit the shot."

In 1964, when Bradley was coming into his senior year at Princeton, a writer named John McPhee took him on as a subject. One day, McPhee saw Bradley throw a ball through the basket with exactly this same funky motion. Bradley told McPhee that the shot was something he'd developed over the summer--practicing it over and over again until orthodox practice produced a reliably unorthodox shot--while simultaneously working on his senior thesis and preparing himself for that fall's Olympic Games.

Bradley told McPhee that the shot was easier than it looked, because if you practiced it enough, you developed "a sense of where you are," a phrase McPhee eventually copped as his book's title. Almost everyone who read the book took to the playground, or to the driveway, or to the hoop that hung on the wall of the barn, and tried that shot until it fell for them, too.

The shot is more complicated in its philosophy than in its execution, so much so that it can be said that when he first appeared as a public figure, Bill Bradley led people in a dance of practiced subversion. After all, to shoot it properly you must abandon certain fundamentals.

You move left to shoot right.

You shoot with your right hand from the left side of the basket.

And you never--ever!--look at the goal, not even when the ball rips through and your opponent is dumbfounded because he played the fundamentals of the game (Force him to his left! Make him shoot back across his body! Turn him away from the basket!) and the fundamentals let him down, because his fundamentals are not yours, and there you are, still not looking at the goal. Look at the goal and you break the faith that created the shot in the first place.

By the time he'd come to Riverwalk Mills, it had become clear that Bradley's fundamentals are not those of Al Gore, who'd done everything that an incumbent vice-president was supposed to do (Pile up cash! Pile up endorsements!) and whose fundamentals seemed to be those of a different game entirely.

Bradley, meanwhile, was campaigning almost as what the old Irish call a shanachie--the traveling storyteller whose accumulation of tales makes him function as the illiterate clan's collective memory--and this is all the more remarkable because Bradley's explanations of what he's doing can be relentlessly, groaningly banal.

"Would you rather hear about your country through polls, or would you rather hear about it through its people?" he asked about a month after opening the Manchester headquarters. He campaigns like an itinerant poet, but he sounds like the government professor you'd leap under your desk to avoid. Think of the shot, then, a spontaneous act of faith born of ceaseless, grinding practice, and perhaps you'll find the heart of his appeal: He hoards himself while others eagerly loan themselves to his campaign; he burrows so deeply into their stories that he conceals himself within them. Suddenly, a carefully crafted campaign is transformed into something organic, an ongoing creative act. And think then of the words of poet Jim Carroll: "With basketball, you can correct your mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair."

He is winding to a conclusion as hard as Bill Bradley can wind to a conclusion. "We are living in times of unprecedented prosperity," he tells the people at his headquarters. "Things are good, but not for all of us." They cheer and they whistle, louder this time. He leaves the podium and moves out into the crowd, jug-eared and pop-eyed, eyebrows dancing, slouching down a bit with every handshake. His face lights up upon meeting people, but the light fades quickly. He is there, and then he is not.

He moves on then to the next person. And to the next. He involves himself so deeply with them that, looking back, they can't find him. He's hiding himself in their stories, and everybody sees what they want to see, the way that a small man sees a brute in the health-club mirror, the way the river borrows its muscle from the faceless wind and its passion from the untamed sky.

THIS IS SOME OF WHAT we know about Bill Bradley, the person, and not the celebrity athlete, the senator, or the presidential aspirant: that he left the Senate in part in order to care for his wife, a remarkable and brilliant woman who'd been diagnosed with breast cancer, and for his daughter. This is some of what we don't know about Bill Bradley: how it felt to get the news about the remarkable and brilliant woman who is his wife; how it felt to consider the prospect of death and loss, of being a widower and a single parent. Does the air thicken and the world spin? Do your perceptions of your own inadequacies come vividly to life? Do you look down into the possibility of grief as if into a canyon, your toes involuntarily edging toward the brink?

Of all of this, nothing. Instead, Bradley explains his departure from the Senate solely as a public act. His official answer is a terrible one: "Because American politics was broken." Oh, spare us. American politics was built to be broken. But it does shut off those areas into which Bradley will not allow inquiry. He seems to demand an interior life that actually is interior.

"I met Bill when he was already in the limelight," says his wife, Ernestine Schlant, "so I saw the defense mechanism that he had developed. It was not that he was uncomfortable being a public figure; it was that he needed to have someplace inside himself where he could go and rejuvenate himself.

"If you're out in the limelight a lot, you give and you give and you give some more. How do you then replenish? He has found that way for himself. Of course, when we met, and as our relationship grew, I was one of the people that was let into the 'inner sanctum,' you know?" She laughs then, and the irony in the last part is so modest and merry that you can hear bells on the quote marks.

It is a measure of how successful Brad-ley has been at measuring out his life that his wife has been the surprise of his campaign. She is a natural campaigner, warm and funny, with the handshake of a Chicago alderman. If Bradley's the professor from whom you hide at cocktail parties, Schlant is the professor whose classes occasion fistfights during registration.

"When I met Bill, I discovered that he realized that you don't have to be a robot when you are a public figure," she says. "He was not an automaton. When Bill talks, he always talks from his heart and from his soul, from within himself."

Nevertheless, Bradley declines to share his anguish over his wife's breast cancer, diagnosed in 1992, with those citizens who tell him about their struggles with the nation's health-care system. He holds back the details of helping to raise his daughter from all those people who come to talk to him about the pressures on working families. In his latest memoir, Time Present, Time Past, he talks about his mother taking him to a summer-camp meeting, whereupon we get a discursive history of the various American revivalist traditions, and suddenly we're out of the tent and young Bill Bradley's nowhere to be seen. If he's washed in the blood of the Lamb, he's dried off by the next paragraph. And now he won't even tell Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes where he goes to church, because it's too private a thing.

It is not simply his private life that seems so delicately tucked away. In his accounts of his days as a player with the New York Knicks--in both Time Present, Time Past and Life on the Run, his earlier account of his NBA career--Bradley is so extraordinarily generous with his accounts of his friends and his teammates that it is easy to overlook how little there is about the author beyond the fact that he worked with some very interesting people.

"Whenever I talked to Bradley," recalls Tom Heinsohn, an old rival from the NBA, "I got the impression that he was getting more out of me than I ever got out of him. Talking to Bill Bradley, you always felt like a butterfly pinned to a card."

Over the past eight years, at the highest level of public life, we've seen inner demons dancing like vaudeville acts on the public stage, and we've seen inner children jockeying for book contracts. We've seen private pain used for public performance. (Who can forget Gore, in 1996, summoning up his poor dead sister as a lobbying device for an antismoking crusade after a career spent protecting tobacco subsidies?) So, this time around, Bradley's demand for a private life that is actually private seems consonant with an electorate that proclaims its disinterest in what George W. Bush may or may not have once put up his nose.

But it's a capital mistake to believe that Bradley has adopted the approach as a tactic to suit a singular zeitgeist. He has always been something of a wandering folklorist. As a senator, he was known to haunt the Boardwalk in Atlantic City as morning broke over the Atlantic, talking to his blearier constituents as they went off to work or play, or some grim combination of both, in the casinos that lined the beach. Their stories went into his repertoire, too. They are now his fundamentals. Look this way. Shoot back that way. Don't look at the goal just because everyone else does.

"To me," Bradley explains, "the power of stories is very strong, because they allow you to communicate on a deeper level than logic, or a deeper level than statistics, or a deeper level than anything, really.

"You see, each of us is a story."

Ah, now here we are. That is one deep and quirky form of the verb right there. The truly tin-eared politician--which is to say, Gore or George W. Bush--would say that each of us has a story, as though the story were a lawn mower or a garden hose, something that he could borrow for a time and then return. To say that each of us is a story is to create a living narrative in which the candidate can himself participate, at least for a while. It is to run for president as a creative act. That it is also damned good politics is rendered almost a philistine quibble--like giving away the ending.

"I've been on the road in America for almost forty years," Bradley says, "as a basketball player and as a U. S. senator and as a businessperson. And the common thread through all of that has been going up to strangers and asking for their stories."

And that is the great mystery of the shan-achie. He's the accumulation of the clan's stories, but his own is buried beneath them. As often as Bradley talks about how much he's learned since he left the Senate--how to connect with people, to make eye contact, to be at ease with different audiences--this is still a charismatic campaign without a charismatic candidate, because charisma isn't a performance technique. It does not come from learning. It comes from those most secret of places--mysterious, even to the person himself.

"I didn't know him when he was young and when he was the big guy in high school and the big guy in his little town," says his wife. "But I know he has learned from a long time ago to keep part of himself for himself."

To be a genuinely charismatic political candidate is to at least seem to share the secrets of the soul, something Bradley has never done--not with his teammates, not with his fellow senators, and not with the country he wants to lead. He's so greedy for other people's stories and such a miser with his own. He is a public man with a cloistered heart.

A BRIGHT AUTUMN DAY in Iowa now, and Bill Bradley is working a precinct in Des Moines, a quiet neighborhood called Beaverdale on the west side of town. "We've had them all through once," says one man grown accustomed to having politicians interrupt him every four years while he's raking his leaves. "Don't use my name," he says, "but the first one that picks up the rake and helps, he's my guy, and the next one will be the first one." Bradley, alas, shakes his hand and moves on. So much for the new politics.

Bradley's press aides vainly try to herd the unwieldy traveling press corps as the candidate walks slowly up the lawn to meet Jack Ward, his son Jim, and Jim's daughter Becky. Bradley does not move with the stiff-legged flamingo stride of so many aging athletes. There's still a flow to him--an old, slow power pulsing low. As he climbs the sloping lawn, the Wards come forward to meet him, walking into a circle of jostling cameramen and beneath a clanking canopy of boom microphones.

Becky Ward bounces from one foot to another. At eleven, she is already a veteran of two Iowa caucus seasons, and Bradley is interested in the candidates she's met. He is smiling and earnest. The cameras swing toward Becky. "You remember a lot of them?" Bradley asks. Becky was not prepared for this--an impromptu current-events quiz, even money to be immortalized on, among other places, Jap-anese television. She demurs.

"I remember about four of them who came to see us," she says. "I don't remember their names."

Bradley laughs gently and moves on, engaging Becky's grandfather in a discussion of social security. "You know, senator, I only have one more question," Jack Ward says. "What's Walt Frazier doing now?"

"Well," Bradley replies, his voice level and even, his tone exactly the same as it was when he and Jack were discussing the prospects for Jack's old age, "he's doing color commentary on television for the Knicks games. And he runs a cruise boat out to the islands in the off-season." The knot of people moves on, but the Wards stay out on the lawn for a while, talking to the tardy--if unencumbered--print media.

"I like his style," Jack Ward says. "There seems to be some substance to his character."

Bradley has moved up the street to another driveway. There is a basketball hoop hanging on the garage. Someone asks him if he still plays.

The fundamentals of the game say that it will be over around Saint Patrick's Day. Bradley will have a good run through Iowa and New Hampshire and California. Then, as the campaign moves south and an idiotically accelerated schedule piles primary atop primary, Gore's advantages in money and manpower will overwhelm the advantages gained by Bradley's early success. By the middle of March, the fundamentals say, the story will be how everyone underrated Al Gore, how Bradley never led him in any opinion poll except those in New Hampshire, and even there by little more than the margin for error. And the fundamentals say that, by then, Bill Bradley will be Robert E. Lee, pushed toward Appomattox, dreaming still of Chancellorsville.

By the fundamentals of the game--or, to be more precise, by the fundamentals of the game Gore is playing--Bradley spent eighteen years in the Senate developing credentials as presidential papabile, to borrow a useful term from Mother Church. However, along with Kerrey, he gradually fell into the category of senators whose presidentiality seemed to decrease in proportion to how close they actually came to running for the office. He was an eccentric Demo-crat but a consistently centrist one, whose colleagues on both sides of the aisle remarked most often on his intelligence, his diligence, his integrity, and his civility.

He took upon himself the work of crafting the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which lowered rates and closed loopholes, and was often cited as a model of how the two parties could work together without fall-ing into fisticuffs. He schooled himself in the complexities of international finance, with a particular interest in the economics of Third World development. He was most noted for pondering issues into a fine pulp and then, at last, jumping in unpredictable ways.

"There's such a thing as being well-informed, and there's such a thing as being thoughtful, and the two don't necessarily go together," says Ben Friedman, a Harvard economist who worked with Bradley on tax-reform issues. "Some folks are so frenetically rushing from this to that, they don't have time to look at anything from deeper than a surface level, and the one thing that impressed me about Bradley was that he's not only well-informed, he seems to be thoughtful, too.

"It just isn't the case that every interesting and important question has a short, simple answer. It just isn't true."

At the same time, Bradley says that he felt himself curiously bound by what he still refers to as the Reagan Mandate, that largely illusory beast conjured up out of the 1980 election results for the purposes of scaring the Democratic party white, you should pardon the expression. He uses this to explain why he crossed party lines to vote for an important piece of the Reagan budget in 1981 and for $100 million in CIA aid to the contra rebels in Nicaragua. The latter vote was so startling that Reagan saw fit to mention it in a subsequent television address. Bradley also voted in favor of vouchers for public-school students but then opposed them when Reagan tried to use the vouchers to support segregated schools.

This wavering seemed to come into sharper relief in 1995 when--after nearly losing his seat to the then-unknown Chris-tie Todd Whitman, and with the 1996 Republican landslide just gathering speed out in the hinterlands--Bradley left the Senate. Later that year, he took part in an abortive movement to start a third-party candidacy. It's not unfair to conclude that his ruminative nature leaves him unable to develop a deep emotional attachment to any political party--which may be his ultimate undoing as a primary candidate.

"I have had no second thoughts about leaving," he says. "I had a wonderful eighteen years. I represented my state the best I could and the country the best that I could, and it was time to move on. I made sure that a Democrat succeeded me, and then went to a deeper encounter with the American people."

It is at moments like these that Bill Bradley can sound like a toweringly pedantic crock of beans--the Deepak Chopra of electoral politics--particularly since he is disinclined to use his personal crises to explain his hiatus from politics. Some of the American people he had deeper encounters with were investment bankers and computer billionaires, who are not bad friends to make if plans have changed and you're intending to run for the nomination of one of the two major parties. Meanwhile, the Democratic party, which had looked to Bradley as one of its leaders, took a fearful pounding. The fundamentals of the game say that Al Gore, who took some of that pounding on his own head, ought to be able to use all this effectively against Bradley in his campaign.

But Bradley's fundamentals are not Gore's. Gore was out there working hard, sweat in his eyes, doing everything right, and Bradley kept using Gore's very competence as a candidate against him, the way the unorthodox fundamentals of the shot made the fundamentals of defense irrelevant. Gore piled up endorsements, and Bradley painted him as hopelessly enthralled by "established power." Gore raised a lot of money, and Bradley subtly hung all those Buddhist nuns around his neck again. Gore hired staff members, and Bradley made them look like the biggest parade of tired hacks since Mark Hanna's funeral procession. Bradley had his own fundamentals, and he made Gore play by them for a very long time.

The conjuring word was authenticity, which meant, in its political incarnation, the ability to run for president without seeming to do so, to shoot without looking at the goal. It meant that a few years spent with Willis Reed and Earl Monroe counted for more than eighteen years spent at the height of government. It meant that chatting with Iowa waitresses and Louisiana shrimpers counted for more than all those lengthy chats with investment bankers. It meant that the candidate's biography included politics only as a kind of anticlimax--informed, and ultimately redeemed, by all the cool stuff that came in the earlier chapters. It conceals grubby strategy behind its incandescent gleam.

"I admit I was an NBA player," Bradley says. "I have had a varied life experience. For ten years, I played the game I loved, and I have had a life since I left the Senate. I think the difference in my life experiences will contribute to a very different kind of presidency."

He has used his biography shrewdly. His NBA days helped him raise money--a single event in Madison Square Garden brought in $1.5 million from people gathered to see a collection of Bradley's old friends and former rivals. But, more than that, he's shrewdly traded upon it without seeming to do so.

Each part of his life informs the others. It has become such a consistent whole that it obscures the fact that having once been a professional athlete is a formidable political tool all on its own--that the 1970 New York Knickerbockers were Bradley's PT-109.

"Basically," Bradley says, "I think we're a good people, but, for most people, politics has become entwined with the mechanics of winning, and the essence of politics is service. That's at the core of politics."

THE JEFFERSON-JACKSON DAY Dinner in Des Moines is one of those lovely old traditions made more garish and less tolerable by the various dogs and ponies of the electronic age. At its core, it's a throwback to the days of torchlight parades, hard cider, and campaign buttons as big as your head. Every four years, however, as a prelude to the Iowa caucuses, the local Demo-crats turn the thing into an ungainly beast with the antennaed head of the Super Bowl stuck upon the torso of the worst football fraternity in the Big Ten conference.

Bradley and Gore both have come to speak here, and Gore is beginning to move into that brass-band mode that seems to be his main response to Bradley's surge in the polls. He marches to the hall at the head of a raucous parade. He teases Brad-ley on the issue of his flight from the Senate. "Stay and fight" is Gore's refrain as he stalks the stage relentlessly.

It is a legitimate issue, and it cuts to the heart of Bradley's campaign, even if Gore manages to be completely charmless in how he raises it. Either Bradley left because "politics was broken," and he's come back to fix it, or politics wasn't really "broken," and Bradley left because he'd grown bored or because the Republicans scared him away. Bradley's answer--absent the personal circumstances that he refuses to use to his political advantage--remains lodged uncomfortably in that gray area between arrogance and chickenshit in which have vanished dozens of previous "insurgent" candidacies.

Meanwhile, the Bradley campaign is attempting to cope with an actual political issue. While he was in the Senate, Bradley was vehemently opposed to federal subsidies for ethanol, a fuel made from corn. He made several cutting remarks about it, most of which were absolutely correct, ethanol being a preposterous boondoggle. Unfortunately, it's a boondoggle beloved by people in Iowa, where they grow more corn than they do in New Jersey. Opposing ethanol in Iowa is such a nonstarter that John McCain, for one, has used his opposition to it as a pretext for ignoring the state entirely.

On the other hand, Bradley has seen the light. He now says that he is in favor of the ethanol subsidies because he has spent some time collecting the stories of Iowa family farmers who would be lost and bereft without them. He says that he has talked to them as part of his ongoing education on the subject of agricultural policy. His minions--most notably his communications director, a fervent wom-an named Anita Dunn--are pushing this line against the Gore people, who are arranging to have a stack of Bradley's previous opinions on ethanol delivered. Genuine politics breaks out for a minute. Other fundamentals are in play, and everyone is momentarily looking at the goal. Dunn is last heard saying, with just the slightest sorrow, that she regrets to see that "the old politics, the politics of confrontation, is still alive," and she means it, too.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S wandering left flank has spent almost twenty years in what can best be described as a premillenarian funk, in no small part because it had been used as a punching bag by those actual premillenarians who all vote Republican. In 1992, though, along came Bill Clinton as the Great Parenthesis, a short wait between cosmic trains, a brief respite before the redeemer finally cometh.

They've gone to the mountain more than once, poor souls. They went with Gary Hart, who did not walk alone. Some of them followed Paul Tsongas, and still others went out into the desert with Jerry Brown in whatever prophetic disguise he had adopted at the time. There have been other minor sectarian movements. But none of them has energized the faithful like Bill Bradley has, and it is on the left that his fundamental strength as a candidate is seen most vividly.

It is not his politics, God knows. Bradley was a consistently centrist voice in the Senate. There are those votes for the contras and for the Reagan budget to explain. His rashly ambitious plan to overhaul the nation's health-care system--which briefly threatened to grace the presidential race with actual substance, before everyone went off to talk about Naomi Wolf and Willis Reed--leaves too many people dependent upon the good faith of the insurance companies to win friends among Democratic southpaws.

On the social issues, Bradley is reliably pro-choice and reliably in favor of gay rights. He has a weird stump answer on the death penalty, which he favors "in cases of drug kingpins and things like the Oklahoma City bombing," a reply he rushes through so quickly, it's only later that you realize his opinion on capital punishment seems to be that he's in favor of it as long as the crime rises to the level of CNN.

Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of the nonlabor left for Bradley seems to be rooted in who he is believed to be, which has been the point of the campaign all along. They see him losing himself in their stories so deeply that they see themselves in him. And Bradley's undeniable personal probity gives them assurance that, this time, the faithful will not be again afflicted by a plague of bimbos and Chinese checkbooks.

They see the simple act of running against Al Gore--"campaigning against established power," in the rubric of the Bradley stump speech--as an act of rebellion. And here is where Bradley's fundamentals work the best. When the commentators on the other side talk about Bradley "moving left," they are really talking about the left moving to him, up the mountain, eyes gleaming.

"In each party, there's always been the establishment and the renegades," explains John Teague, a lawyer and an old McCarthy hand in New Hampshire from the heady days of 1968. "In '68, we were the renegades, and this year it's the same thing. The established power is behind Al Gore." There is little doubt that, in Brad-ley, people like John Teague hear their own stories retold.

He can come to community health centers in places like Roxbury in Boston, and he can listen intently, ask cogent questions, and say things like, "The key thing is to be vivid about the importance of community health centers. If your story can tell me about something that happened to someone, that's the way you communicate the importance of what a community health center is," and they hear trumpets from the high ground.

"I haven't been this excited since Bobby Kennedy," one old Massachusetts liberal said, and he meant it, too, hearing some song of his own in the muted strings of the cloistered heart.

THERE IS SUBSTANCE to his boredom, because he seems to study it, gauging its limits, plumbing its depths, rolling it around in his mind. When he is bored, as he often appears to be, Bill Bradley seems more fascinated with his own boredom than most people are with their hobbies. But when he talks about his experience with race, his eyes steady up and they shine, and there is a glimpse, quick and fleeting, not of something that is borrowed but of something that simply is--round and primal. If it is not a vision of the country, it's as close as he comes to one.

"What I didn't know until the summer in college when I went up to teach in Harlem," he says, "was the urban subculture. I didn't know about everybody out in the street at night--families and aunts and grandparents. That was the energy there. I didn't know the rhythms of the street." And, in back of the story, you can hear the echoes of authenticity, that conjuring word of this election, struggling against the fierce power of useful fear and not working, not working at all yet, and maybe not working ever.

He has luxuriated in talking about race but not in the modern sense in which we all have passed over Jordan into Canaan. For Bradley, the issue that he maintains is central both to his campaign and to his life, the civil-rights movement, is not yet complete, and here he runs up against not only twenty years of amnesiac politics but also against the limits of his campaign.

He has not done so unscarred. He was excoriated in The New Republic for appearing on a stage in Harlem with Al Sharpton, and his attempt to argue that his experience with the Knicks was an education in race has been ridiculed both in that publication and from across the pond by its second-most-recently-cashiered editor. "A pompous, self-satisfied bore," moaned Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times. "Because as a professional basketball player he had plenty of interaction with black Americans, he thinks he has a unique insight into their 'plight.'-" As opposed to, one imagines, those insights gleaned as a boy columnist for the Tory press.

Now, even granting that anyone who reads TNR for the subject of race probably reads Popular Mechanics for the recipes, it is undeniable that Bradley's focus on race has availed him very little. Gore's hold on African-American voters--especially in the South--remains remarkably constant. And among white voters, Bradley is attempting to engage the issue of the subtle resegregation of the country, which is something that many people don't think exists--and if they do, they're just as liable to blame Al Sharpton for it.

Bradley repeatedly argues on the stump that "in my administration, the way to please the boss will be to have done something that day to promote racial unity in this country." But, most often, Bradley talks about race the way that he talks about everything else--as something organic, as a process, as something creative and not held in amber for us all to gaze upon every January on Martin's birthday. However, he also talks about it quietly--speaking his passion dispassionately--and there's the end limit to his campaign. This is the place where his fundamentals stop working. It is a peek, briefly, into the cloister of his heart.

"If I were bringing my literary eye to this story," his wife muses, "it wouldn't just be the story of a public figure, but it would be the story of the contrast between the public figure, who is supposed to further his public goals, and the sensitivity of the man when he is not in a public place.

"In a sense, in what he is doing, Bill is very vulnerable."

If it is to work, this campaign, if it is to sell his flip-flops on things like ethanol as conscience, if he is going to be a politician without politics, and especially if he is going to move beyond the stale category of race, he's going to have to become president one day, and for that he may be asked to give something he doesn't want to deliver--to be passionate about his passions, to share something that he may not be able to share. What will he do then, at the end of all the stories except his own? Will he surrender the key to himself? And what is the sound of a cloistered heart breaking?

THE CANDIDATE is rocking. He is not rocking as fast as the choir in the Mount Hebron Baptist Church in Des Moines, and he is not rocking as hard as Justin Triplett, a

twelve-year-old drummer who's got the Holy Spirit in his heart and Tony Williams in his hands. You can hear Triplett way out on Ninth Street, and he has the candidate rocking, too, hands clapping softly on the offbeat, a sway to his upper body, a single wavery reed in the great, raucous torrent of the choir.

"Ain't God all right?" asks the Reverend Bobby Young, and it is generally agreed that God is all right.

The candidate has come to talk to them and not to preach, because Bill Bradley does not preach. He's no good at it, so he doesn't try. In fact, he delivers what is little more than his basic stump speech. He talks about his father and his mother and the timeless banks that line the Mississippi River near his hometown in Missouri. "I looked at them, and I always felt like I was part of something that lasts," he tells the congregation. He gets an amen for the riverbanks.

He tells them his stories, all the stories he's collected in a lifetime of collecting. His voice doesn't race, the way it does when he talks about himself. They are becoming a story, too. Their stories are becoming his, and he draws them all in. His campaign hangs there within these stories and among the various unarticulated connections between them. Those connections are the fundamentals of his campaign. They are beyond the other fundamentals--money, endorsements, and, ultimately, power--the way that the fundamentals of the shanachie are beyond those of the shopkeeper. Somewhere between the sliding river and the timeless bluffs, Bradley will find whether the collective is enough.

There is a long story about a friend of his in Montana who, lost in an airplane, once followed a shining river through the darkness toward home. He loses his audience somewhere as the plane is flying around in the dark. People start fanning themselves harder. Children grow restless and chattery. However, the congregation picks up the story when the river brings the lost person home. Then he talks to them about healing what he calls the American racial divide. And there is a straightening, and the children are shushed. The hand fans stop their constant flutter.

He tells them about the time, right after the first verdict in the Rodney King beating case, when he stood before the Senate and smacked a pencil down on the podium fifty-six times, once for every blow that dropped on King. "I wondered if words could convey the anger and sadness I felt," he says, and he slaps the pulpit just once. The crowd sags, and it is with him again. The choir rises. Justin Triplett begins to wail. Sunlight floods the sanctuary.

"If I'm on my way home," Bill Bradley tells the choir, "I want you all to go with me."